


The Limits of the Page

by CourierNinetyTwo



Category: RWBY
Genre: Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 07:57:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5084050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNinetyTwo/pseuds/CourierNinetyTwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cinder Fall, or how she came to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Limits of the Page

It starts, like so many fairytales do: with a girl and her mother.

She names you after fire. Not the fire that flickers across nails so thick they may as well be claws, dancing between all ten fingertips, but the sort that lingers in the heart of a forge, the belly of a mountain, so deep down it can replenish itself forever. It’s a choice, or so you understand then, to have your name be common to the language here instead of the foreign tones that rise and fall from her lips by nature.

It’s not foreign to you, though. Her words are your milk tongue, the one that sings you to sleep every night.

Your father is different than her. Human.

More time passes before you realize the difference, that people are divided into categories where some never have fangs or pointed ears or eyes that pierce the dark, and the rest are forced to border’s edge, to islands and deep caves where safety can never be assured. The other families leave when there’s rumors of war, but yours stays – until the soldiers come. **  
**

Your mother fights them to a man, using all the Dust she has in her possession until there’s nothing left but her bare and scalded hands, tearing at their armor, clawing at their eyes. Although you’re kept inside, you see it all through the window, and wonder why your father hasn’t moved to stop them. Later on you learn the origin of fear, the signs of it, how cowards are born for all to see.

Then the soldiers come for you.

“She’s not one of them!” Your father shouts, finally moved to action. He spits and kicks as they hold him back, as the captain among them grabs you hard enough to bruise. “I swear it!”

A gauntleted hand leads you down to the basement, where the shadows are layered too deep for you to see. That’s the first test, but the next is someone’s fingers forcing your jaw open, so wide that it’s impossible to bite down unless you want to take off part of your own tongue. Part is you is tempted to try anyway.

“No fangs, no forked tongue.” The captain almost seems disappointed. “And she’s blind as we are down here. Let the child go.”

It’s then that you realize you’re human too.

A year passes, and you grow, despite the stunting influence of grief. Your father left your mother’s ashes behind after moving to another village, and there’s nothing left of her but the blood still running through your veins. He’s stopped speaking of her entirely, but no one ever asks why he has no wife. It’s said there are creatures that lurk in the forest nearby, shadows that walk taller than men, and many in the village with children have no wives or husbands.

Which is why when your father does remarry, the woman he chooses already has two daughters of her own. They’re both older than you and eager to show it with constant reminders that you’re too slight for your age, that the bronze tint to your skin ensures it will never match theirs. All of your stepsisters’ chores eventually pass to you when they grow bored of them; the cleaning, the washing, the mending. Every task is mind-numbing, but you’re finer with a needle than the seamstress up the road that charges a solid gold Lien for her alterations.

Your father never intervenes. Like your mother, his second wife overshadows him, but it doesn’t go unnoticed that this time he went to a woman that looks so much more like himself. There is no wildness, no dark and beautiful hair flowing like a tide of the purest ink, and her nails are brittle, useless things. So brittle that she often assigns their care to you, filing broken edges and painting over whatever even surfaces are left.

One day, when she is particularly displeased, the bottle of polish is thrown right at your head. Her aim is poor, and it shatters on the far wall, falling into your hair. You’re forced to spend the rest of the night picking up every single shard, with nothing to save your hands from the sting of alcohol in the paint’s mixture.

She despises you. That would be plain to see from a look alone, the disgust that pervades her expression if you ever accidentally touch her, or surprise her by walking into a room uninvited. However, she goes out of her way to erase any doubt, spitting curses your way no matter how well you perform her tasks.  _Half-breed_  is chief among them.

That she would hate you for your mother’s blood, the only thing you have ever been allowed to keep, fills you with something powerful. This something coils in your stomach, feeding on the bitterness there, and grows with each passing day. Your stepsisters nourish it as well, on the nights they ‘accidentally’ clear the table before you’ve had a chance for supper, in the mornings when your wet clothes are stripped from the hanging line and left to mold in the cold shadows nearby.

At some point you come to know it as rage, but for now it is simply a catalyst.

For all of his passive failures, your father does finally teach you to read with the common human alphabet. Your mother was well-versed in the complicated script of her clan, but never had the opportunity to show you more than the most basic of characters, trying to coax your youthful tongue around the sounds they produced as she showed you the order they were written in on your palm. You weave all of this knowledge together, and eventually, an opportunity presents itself.

The only hobby your father has of any note is collecting books. When you start to borrow them for your own perusal, he doesn’t stop you, but both of your stepsisters find it amusing to set them out of reach or in disgusting places if you don’t keep your daily reading well-hidden. Between your chores, in the idle hours when they go with their mother to the market, you devour every new word exposed to your eye, trace lines of ink older than the foundations of the house surrounding you.

It is there you learn that Dust is not just the powder that keeps the fires lit, or food cold when the summer threatens to make it spoil, but a tool with infinite potential; that it can be found in crystals and other raw shapes before being honed into something more. In the hands of hunters and warriors, it could even become a weapon.

There is a caveat. Dust only offers its full power to those who have had their soul pulled from their body, closer to the surface, and you have never heard of such a thing. Thus your search is stifled until another book tells you trained healers can work this wonder, and the old crone who lives by the river is most assuredly one of those.

Then comes the question of being hurt enough to need her; nothing so shallow your father would try and assuage it himself, but not so dire you die before she can work her magic. In the end, it is a simple equation; you simply cannot live like this any longer, and would rather perish in the trying than keep still.

A black haze suffuses your skull after you jump from the roof. While disorienting at first, something about it dispels most of the pain you expected to feel, leaving you numb. As planned, you fall right in front of the window your father sees past his desk. You see him jump to his feet, reflected through the thick pane of glass, and one slow blink later, he is shouting and crying your name like a prayer. He is carrying you to the healer.

It does hurt when you’re laid down on her bed, the rickety frame of sticks and raw wool more like a nest than anything else. She fusses over you, eyes the color of tarnished gold, and reeks of a hundred herbs you can’t name, but eventually you hear her pronouncement, and have to focus on the heart of your pain to keep from smiling.

“I must do it, sire.” A wrinkled finger gestures to your chest. “Blood will soon be seeping into her lungs if I don’t.”

“But won’t the Grimm come for her?” He is aghast, and you think he may really love you, but it’s too late to see this undone. “She’s just a girl.”

The crone’s lip curls upward, and something about her anger is soothing. “A thousand girls have gone into that forest with little more than their soul and wits arming them to keep this village safe for generations.”

“I meant no offense.” Your father gasps in haste. As always, he buckles. “Please save her.”

When the healer puts both hands over your heart, you’re not sure what to expect, but then she is chanting in a language you don’t know, and presses down so hard agony whites out your vision. No, the white is sparks spreading from her fingertips, filling you like a vessel. It aches like nothing you’ve ever felt before, and when she clenches her hand into a fist, your ribs snap back into place. A scream tears from your throat and she shushes you with surprising tenderness, pulling the string of your soul taut before letting go.

“There, there. A week and you’ll be good as new.” The crone turns to your father, who is so pale he looks an inch from death. “She should spend the night here. I will give you a moment for goodbyes.”

He doesn’t say goodbye. Instead your father leans over you, eyes dull with fear when he asks, “Why were you on the roof, girl?”

“I saw a bird up there.” The lie is easy, and his relief plain. “It was beautiful. I wanted to catch it.”

“And you fell.” He finishes the story for you with a sigh, fingers trembling as he touches your shoulder.

Whatever sorcery is expected doesn’t occur, but his fingers are cold, and you’ve never felt that from him before. The chill remains even as he slips from the crone’s hut, leaving you to her mercy for the night.

The next morning, you are more alive than ever. Every color you see is brighter, nature’s glory cast not only on root and leaf, but the sunlight itself, the fire in the hearth you see after your father carries you home again. For the first time in your life, he tells your stepsisters to leave you be, saying you need rest.

Being confined to bed makes you restless, but a soft request for books is answered with an entire stack, and you read them until sunrise comes, tearing out and swallowing all the knowledge within. Passages you merely skimmed over before make perfect sense now, with all their talk of energy and channeling power to all it’s meant to be.

What you’re missing is Dust itself. The raw crystals are so expensive only merchants traveling from the far capital ever carry them, selling to hunters as they pass each other on the roads. Yet you know there are a few pouches of powder in the house closet, red and glistening, flame tightly contained in every single granule.

By the time you form your plan, your stepsisters are outraged at your perceived idleness, that the lion’s share of chores set upon your shoulders alone for so long has been returned to theirs during your convalescence. It doesn’t take long for their old tricks to return, and your father’s surge of concern for your well-being shrinks with each passing day.

That you could bear from experience, but your stepmother is the breaking point. The first day you’re on your feet again, you steal away to the closet with an empty vial from your father’s medical cabinet – what it contained originally, you cannot say – and fill it with Dust from the largest pouch, hoping its absence will go unnoticed. Except she is waiting for you when you open the door from within, preventing your escape.

“Little thief!” Her shriek hurts your ears, so much more sensitive than they were before. “What wicked things were you up to in there?”

What else could you do but lie? “Nothing. I was just making sure we didn’t need supplies from the market.”

“A likely story.” Hatred gutters in her eyes, staining their color. “Hold out your hands, both of them.”

You’ve sewn pockets into this dress, but they’re in front for convenience’s sake, and there’s no way to slip the vial into one of them without your stepmother seeing. So you keep still, hands behind your back, and her face purples with rage. You would be afraid, if her anger could possibly compare to yours.

“Show me or I’ll cut one of them off.” She snarls, holding out her own hand, palm up and empty. “That’s what’s done to thieves here, don’t you know?”

Now you’re irritated, and it’s not as if she’d understand your purpose in the first place. Bringing the vial into view, you keep a tight grip on it, so tight your knuckles ache. “It’s just some Dust.”

Underneath her voluminous sleeves and skirts is a strength you hadn’t known she possessed. She slaps you hard enough that for a moment you think you’ve fallen from the roof again, dazed and barely holding onto consciousness. Your fingers tense by instinct, the vial shattering into a thousand pieces, most of which slice right into your skin.

Except the Dust doesn’t spill – it  _sticks_.

Crimson fragments cling to the blood dripping from your palm, soaking through, and you’re burning like a beacon. Everything you are is ablaze, hungry and triumphant. No pain comes, not when this is what you were always meant to be, stealing the oxygen from the air and leaving ash in your wake. 

Your first cogent thought is that you need  _more_.

All of her bluster is extinguished when you laugh, the hand she struck you with a ripe pink from the force of impact. You are untouchable, feeling a pull in the center of your gut as you survey the glass scattered across the floor. Were it any other day, this would just be a new mess for you to clean up.

You pull back.

What a wonder it is when the broken pieces rise with you, even the tiniest slivers buried in the wound. They slide free, red and sharp, and your flesh knits together without any prompting. There’s not even one hint of a scar. The glass tingles like chimes in the air, responding to every subtle flick and flex of your fingers, and you want to shout for all the joy it fills you with.

“Witch!” Oh, how she gasps it, as if you are the most awful creature wrought upon creation. You are, you  _are_  and thus that is the last thing she sees before the glass flies, splitting her throat into a wide, twisted smile.

When your stepmother’s body hits the floor, it’s with a terrible sound, gagging and uncouth. You chose this early autumn morning for a reason; your father and her daughters are still asleep, cradled by dawn’s light, and even the final throes of death don’t wake them. The wood beneath your bare feet is slick now, a particular stench starting to pervade the air, but all of that is ignored as you take the entire pouch of Dust from its shelf, kneeling so you can bury your hands in it. Your soul drinks deep until you realize what other work there is to be done.

Who would think to look for your body, after all, if the house burned down with everyone else inside?

Just the thought comforts you, warm as an embrace. You’re not half of anything anymore, but your own person, something greater than any mere hybrid could produce. Not to say that you don’t honor what your mother left to you, even if you now claim what runs in your veins as yours and yours alone. She was the one who gave you a name, and you’re not foolish enough to dismiss the power of that.

 _Cinder_ , fitting in your mouth like something sweet.

So it ends, like so many fairytales do: with a legacy of blood yet to be spilled.


End file.
